


Cypress

by vulcansmirk



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-04
Updated: 2013-07-04
Packaged: 2017-12-17 15:44:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/869215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulcansmirk/pseuds/vulcansmirk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If angels don't believe, who will?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cypress

When Castiel found Sam running an old rosary through his hands, he laid a hand on his shoulder and took him to the church.

 

Cas had found the place while on the run, before he’d concocted the Biggerson’s plan. It was a small place, and old; weatherbeaten stones still stood sentinel at its base, but where the mortar had crumbled away stone had been replaced by a hard, resilient wood. Even that wood had aged enough to look worn, but when Castiel had first seen the place, it had been a spired silhouette rising against the orange dawn, and nothing could have looked more permanent.

Now, the shimmering purple light of dusk glinted across the stained glass window in the building’s façade, and that window breathed with the mysticism of a third eye. Castiel glanced at Sam and thought that he and the church carried the same ageless weight on their shoulders.

At the moment, Sam looked startled. A little because of the change of scenery, but mostly, Cas thought, because of the sudden reappearance of the Winchesters’ wayward angel. Sam opened his mouth to speak.

“Cas, what – ”

The angel shook his head, motioned toward the door.

Sam fell quiet. His eyes followed Cas’s hand, and, after a pause, so did his feet, the rosary dangling from his tightened fist. Inside, the dusty dark eddied with the breaths of things invisible. Shards of colored light glanced off dust motes, glistened on pews, glittered in the auburn strands of Sam’s hair. Castiel walked beside Sam, matching him step for step, and the bags under the man’s eyes were less visible now, but Cas knew they were there. He could feel them in Sam’s slow, dragging steps.

They sat in the very front row, just to the left of the aisle. An enormous cypress cross towered above them, and behind it Jesus stood with arms outstretched in fragments of color and lines of lead. Twilight shadows filled his open palms.

Sam turned to Castiel now with a quietly assessing gaze.

“Where were you, Cas?” he asked, not unkindly. “We thought you blew town.”

Images of blue-shirted girls with cheerful smiles and angel blades coated in blood passed through Castiel’s head. “Nowhere of import,” he said.

A leaden silence fell between them then. Movement drew Cas’s attention to Sam’s hands – he looped his fingers in and out of that pretty little rosary, brushed it delicately with his fingertips, cupped it gently in his palm. It looked old.

“Where did you get that?” Cas inquired softly.

Sam looked up into Castiel’s face, then back down at his hands. “It was my mom’s,” he murmured, with a small smile, and even at so low a volume his voice rumbled in the rafters. “My dad used to keep it tucked in the spine of his journal. One of the few signs that he was still human.” A short, mirthless laugh. Then he paused, and his smile took on a razor’s edge of sadness. “He really loved her, you know?”

Castiel made no reply.

When the echoes of that thought had sunk into the stone beneath their feet, Sam went on. “Dean said… He told me once that she used to say angels were watching over him. Put him to bed like that every night. She was brought up a hunter, but she still believed in angels. Believed in God.” There was that rueful smile again. “Sometimes I think the only reason I still believe is so I can be close to her somehow. This…” He jangled the rosary weakly. “This is all I really have left of her. I don’t even remember her.”

Sam’s eyes fell unseeing somewhere in front of him (ahead and down, always down) and as Castiel listened, he turned Sam’s words over in his head, laid them on his tongue and explored the crevices and the cracks, imagined how they would taste coming out of his own mouth. The faint smell of that cypress cross wafted over them both.

Sam straightened slightly. His smile this time had lost some of that sad edge. “I’d like to think she would’ve been proud of me,” he whispered. The seas sparkled in his tired, stormy eyes. “She would’ve loved to hear about Stanford, y’know? She would’ve smiled at me and told me how proud she was.” A slow breath. “She would’ve pointed to that and said, ‘That, there, Sammy, that’s God letting you know that he cares for you, and that he’s proud of you, too.’ ”

He glanced at Cas then and cleared his throat. “Sorry, I know it’s a touchy subject,” he said.

Cas blinked, and stuttered back, “No, it’s… it’s fine.”

Sam shot Castiel a tight, apologetic smile, and for an instant Cas could have fallen endlessly through the blue-green irises of his empathy. Then Sam faced front again, but he didn’t look down. He looked straight ahead, his unwavering gaze resting at the base of that towering crucifix (where the Son’s feet would have been, ankles ringed with barbs and dripping blood, holes bored into his feet and those shining red, too), and his hands had stilled with that rosary twined firmly around one wrist, tiny cross hidden in his palm. He straightened, and a strange look passed over his face, like… steadiness. Like certainty.

As Castiel watched, the light behind the window dimmed, the last sliver of sun sinking below the distant hills with an audible sigh. The shadows in Jesus’s palms spread, sliding up his arms, draping across his face like a cowl. But for a moment, the light across Sam’s face seemed to swell; it gathered in golden strands on his skin and intensified, sang with a lilting soprano and hummed with the timbre of the Earth’s own aching, deliberate breaths. Sam didn’t smile, but something about him exuded an unfailing kindness, an unexcepting reverence.

Castiel remembered Jesus. In this moment, he remembered very well.

The light receded. Sam spoke once more. “Maybe you don’t agree,” he began, “and I know you have every reason in the world not to. But I think He is there. And I think He still cares. I have to believe that. Because if He’s not there…” Sam glanced down at the floor once more. “I have to believe that He’ll forgive me,” he said. “That someone will forgive me. I need to believe that so maybe I can start to forgive myself.”

Cas waited a beat, then said, “I forgive you.”

When Sam looked up at him, his smile was small, but warm, and his eyes, while not quite dancing, skipped perhaps a little with laughter. “Thanks, Cas,” he said, fervently. And then he rotated on the pew, lifted his hands and trapped Castiel’s fingers between his palms, the little cross on the rosary imprinting itself on the skin of Cas’s knuckle. And Sam looked Cas right in the eye – didn’t look sick or tired at all – and said, “I forgive you, too.”

Castiel stared. What was that line, from that novel Cas had once read?  _An extraordinary gift for hope._

Absurdly, Cas thought of Dean. And he thought,  _I don’t have that extraordinary gift_ ; but Sam did, and maybe Sam could give it to Castiel, too.

A long while later, when they finally left the church, dust and light and the smell of cypress followed them out the door. They walked out and disappeared into fragrant, hissing rain.


End file.
